The United States National Herbarium is a collection of five million preserved plant specimens housed in the Department of
Botany at the
National Museum of Natural History, which is part of the
Smithsonian Institution. It represents about 8% of the plant collection resources of the United States and is one of the ten largest
herbaria in the world.
The
herbarium
A herbarium (plural: herbaria) is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study.
The specimens may be whole plants or plant parts; these will usually be in dried form mounted on a sheet of paper (called ...
was founded in 1848, when the first collections were
accessioned from the
United States Exploring Expedition, when botanists pressed approximately 50,000 specimens, representing 10,000 species of plants.
The ''
Index Herbariorum
The Index Herbariorum provides a global directory of herbaria and their associated staff. This searchable online index allows scientists rapid access to data related to 3,400 locations where a total of 350 million botanical Biological specim ...
'' code assigned to this herbarium is US
and this abbreviation is used when citing housed specimens.
References
External links
{{Authority control
Herbaria in the United States
Smithsonian Institution